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Privacy Policy

Privacy statement for Courses.ie, a website owned and operated by Seats Are Ltd t/a Courses.ie.

This statement relates to our privacy practices in connection with this website. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites. Any external links to other websites are clearly identifiable as such. If you register on Courses.ie, we will require some personal information.

Personal information/data as used in this Privacy Policy refers to information such as your name, birth date, e-mail address, mailing address, or telephone number that can be used to identify you. Generally, we will only process your personal information/data as described in this Privacy Policy. However, we may have to conduct additional processing to the extent permitted or required by law, or in support of any legal or criminal investigation.

Most of our services do not require any form of registration, allowing you to visit our site without the need to give us any personal information about you. Some services may require you to provide us with personal information/data. In these situations, if you choose to withhold any personal information/data requested by us, it may not be possible for you to gain access to certain parts of the site and for us to respond to your query. We may process your personal information/data to provide you with products or services you express an interest in, to bill you for products and services you request, to market products and services which we think may be of interest to you, or to communicate with you for other purposes which we assess would be in our legitimate interest to do so and we assess in not invasive, unexpected or unwanted by you.

This Privacy Policy and our Data Protection Policy are guided by the GDPR (2016/79), Irish Data Protection Acts 1988 to 2018 and SI 336 of 2011 – European Communities (Electronic Communication Network and Services), (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2011) as well as relevant national law.

1. Who are we and how to contact us

The data controller for our websites is Seats Are Ltd t/a Courses.ie. This means that we are responsible for deciding how and why we hold and use your personal data. If you want to contact us, you can find our contact details on our ‘Contact Us’ page.

2. Our Principles
We do our very best to protect your privacy by using security technology appropriately. This means we make sure that we have appropriate security measures in place to protect your information. We respect your privacy. We will collect and use individual user details only if we have your permission or we have legitimate business reasons for doing so, such as collecting enough information to manage subscriptions.

We will be clear in our dealings with you as to what information about you we will collect and how we will use it. We will use personal information only for the purposes for which it was originally collected and we will make sure we delete it securely.

3. Collection and use of personal information

Courses.ie does not collect any personal data about you on this website, apart from information which you volunteer (for example by becoming a registered user, entering our competitions or taking part in commenting on our content). Any information which you provide in this way is not made available to any third parties, however, we may send relevant marketing emails on behalf of third parties but without allowing those third parties to have access to any personal data.

4. What information can you supply when you register

Your name, email address and Courses.ie password

Your address and postcode

The courses, subject areas and institutions that interest you

Your journey across the site

Your email preferences

You can browse Courses.ie without providing any personal information. However, to access the enhanced website and directly contact course providers, you may have to register. For this, we require your name and email address. You can log in to the website and complete your profile if you wish.

5. Collection and use of technical information

Cookies are used to enhance user experience by storing user preferences and to automatically log users into the site. The Policy concerning the use of cookies is detailed in our Cookies Policy

Technical details in connection with visits to this website are logged by our internet service provider for our statistical purposes. No information is collected that could be used by us to identify website visitors. The technical details logged are confined to the following items:

the IP address of the visitor’s web server

the top-level domain name used (for example .ie, .com, .org, .net)

the previous website address from which the visitor reached us, including any search terms used

clickstream data which shows the traffic of visitors around this web site (for example pages accessed and documents downloaded)

the type of web browser used by the website visitor. Courses.ie will make no attempt to identify individual visitors, or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual. It is the policy of Courses.ie never to disclose such technical information in respect of individual website visitors to any third party (apart from our internet service provider, which records such data on our behalf and which is bound by confidentiality provisions in this regard), unless obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law. The technical information will be used only by Courses.ie, and only for statistical and other administrative purposes.

6. Logging in using social networking credentials

If you login to our sites using a Google or Facebook login (or any other social media), you are granting permission to that network to share your user data with us. This will include your name, email address date of birth and location, which will then be used to form part of your user profile on our website. You can also use your picture from that social network as part of your user profile. This will allow us and that network to share your network user ID and any other information you choose to share from your social network account. If you delete this association of your social network account from your user profile, we will no longer have access to this information.

7. Posting comments on our website

When you post information on a discussion board or comment publicly on a course, college or article on our website, the information you post and your username are publicly accessible. This information can be viewed online and collected by other people. We are not responsible for the way these other people use this information. When contributing to a discussion, we strongly recommend you avoid sharing any personal details, and especially information that can be used to identify you directly such as your name, age, address and name of employer. We are not responsible for the privacy of any identifiable information that you post in our online community or other public pages of the site.

8. How and why we use your information

To send emails about competitions, promotions, surveys or other features.

To pass your contact details onto the course provider so that they can respond to you directly. We will not pass your details to anyone else without your permission.

For our own general research purposes.

To contact you in response to any feedback you give us.

To send marketing communications when we have your permission, or when permitted by law.

To respond to your queries and to resolve complaints

To personalise our services (for example, so you can sign in), remembering your settings, displaying personalised advertising as well as measuring how effective our online adverts are, recognising you when you sign in on different devices and tailoring our marketing communications based on what you read on our sites.

To carry out marketing analysis, for example we look at what you have viewed on our sites and apps and to better understand what your interests and preferences are, and to improve our marketing by making it more relevant to your interests and preferences.

To improve our marketing communications, we use a similar technology to cookies to confirm whether you have opened a marketing email or clicked on a link in the email.

To sell advertising space on our sites. Our website is funded by advertising.

For statistical purposes such as analysing the performance of our sites and apps and to understand how visitors use them.

For security and fraud prevention, and to ensure that our sites and apps are safe and secure and used in line with our terms of use.

To comply with applicable laws and regulations.

9. Legal grounds for using your personal data

We will only use your personal data where we have a legal ground to do so. We determine the legal grounds based on the purposes for which we have collected and used your personal data. In every case, the legal ground will be one of the following:

Consent: For example, where you have provided your consent to receive information about courses from ourselves or a college directly. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

Our legitimate interests: to operate a functional profitable business, we will process your personal data, for example, sending you emails about products and services we believe you may be interested in and that are not invasive, unwanted or unexpected from time to time. In the case of marketing emails, you can ‘Opt-out’ of receiving these by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email or through your email preferences in the “emails and marketing” tab, when signed into your account.It is also in our legitimate interest to carry out marketing analysis to determine what products and services may be relevant to the interests of our visitors. You can opt-out from having your personal data used for marketing analysis in your account from the “emails and marketing” tab.

Compliance with law: In some cases, we may have a legal obligation to use or keep your personal data

10. Updating your personal data and your profile page on our sites

When you register for an account with Courses.ie, you have access to a profile page. Under “edit profile” you can review what information is public when you comment on our articles, or if people look up your profile. You can also update your information or provide extra information if you want. You may also update your marketing preferences in the “Emails and marketing” tab in your account.

11. Links to other websites

This privacy notice does not cover links to course provider websites. Please read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.

14. How long we keep your personal data

We keep your personal data for no longer than is necessary. How long we need you personal data depends on what we are using it for, as set out in this privacy policy. For example, we may need to use it to answer your queries about a product or service and as a result may keep personal data while you are still using our product or services. If we no longer need your data, we will delete it or make it anonymous by removing all details that identify you. If we have asked for your permission to process your personal data and we have no other lawful grounds to continue with that processing, and you withdraw your permission, we will delete your personal data. However, when you unsubscribe from marketing communications, we will keep your email address to ensure that we do not send you any marketing in future

13. How we may contact you
Responding to service queries

If you request information from us we will contact you usually by the same method you used to contact us.

Marketing communications

If we have your permission, we may send you materials we think may interest you. Depending on your marketing preferences, this may be by email, phone, SMS or post.

You can decide not to receive these emails at any time and will be able to “unsubscribe” directly by clicking a link in the email or through your email preferences in the tab “Emails and marketing” when you are signed in to your Courses.ie account.

Market research

Sometimes we may contact you for market research purposes, for example about a survey. You can opt out from being contacted in this way by signing into your account and going to the tab “Emails and marketing”.

Responding to your queries or complaints

If you have raised a query or a complaint with us, we may contact you to answer your query or to resolve your complaint.

14. Online Advertising

Advertising on our sites that is based on cookies and similar technology

We use personalised online advertising on our sites. This allows us to deliver more relevant advertising to people who visit www.courses.ie. It works by showing you adverts that are based on your browsing patterns and the way you have interacted with our sites and apps. It then shows you adverts which we believe may interest you.

When you browse our sites or use our apps, some of the cookies and similar technology we place on your device are advertising cookies, so we can understand what sort of pages you are interested in. We can then display advertising on your browser based on these interests.

We do not collect or use information such as your name, email address, postal address or phone number for personalised online advertising.

We may also share online data collected through cookies and similar technology with our advertising partners. This means that when you are on another website, you may be shown advertising based on your browsing patterns on Courses.ie. We may also show you advertising on Courses.ie website based on your browsing patterns on other sites that we have obtained from our advertising partners.

Online retargeting is another form of online advertising that allows us and some of our advertising partners to show you advertising based on your browsing patterns and interactions with a site away from our sites.

15. Our Data Processors

The following is a list of third-party organisations that might be used by Seats Are Ltd t/a Courses.ie in the general operation of its business and the processing and storage of data. We have satisfied ourselves that these companies maintain the highest standards of data storage and security and that they are fully

Seats Are Ltd operates a number of websites offering information about courses, education, jobs, recruitment and employment in Ireland. These websites all operate within our group of websites and are all solely owned by Seats Are Ltd.